Penelope Green’s recent New York Times obituary of Virginia Ramey Mollenkott is noteworthy to anyone who has followed churches’ long 20th-century debates about same-sex relationships and marriage. Mollenkott was far ahead of the curve in bringing a progressive, liberationist perspective to the evangelical Christian subculture.

The book “Is the Homosexual My Neighbor: Another Christian View”, which she wrote with Letha Scanzoni, was one of the central texts cited by The Other Side magazine and others on the sexual-revolution left.

As a video of Mollenkott’s address at Harvard Divinity School in 2002 shows, she was a captivating speaker, combining a native Philadelphian’s self-assurance with pleas to her sister feminists not simply to dismiss the Bible in their efforts to root out all traces of patriarchy.

Mollenkott stressed that wrestling with the contents of the Bible was key, along with the writing of John Milton, in her stepping away from the Plymouth Brethren theology in which she grew up.

If a reader leaves it there, it becomes easier to take the Times at its word that Mollenkott remained an “evangelical,” but in this case that would be to treat an adjective as a noun.

The Times links to a page on Mollenkott’s website in which the longtime professor and activist gave her own explanation of what she was “evangelical” about:

John Milton was a 17th century Puritan who loved Scripture. From studying his interpretive method, being challenged by feminist thinkers, and interpreting my dreams, I gradually began to trust my own experience. And I began to read the Bible with attention to literary formats, historical context, what words meant at the time the text was written, the use of imagery, analogy, symbol, and so forth. The text was transformed by these standard interpretive methods, and I in turn was radicalized by the Bible. I am now a member of the evangelical left, working with other Christian feminists toward a world in which all people are respected and cherished as made in God’s image, and in which the natural environment is respected and cherished as being created and sustained by one Great Spirit. I guess you could call me and Evangelical Universalist.